"Fascinating Fascism," Final Thoughts on _Watch on the Rhine_
Randy McDonald
the first two times, if perhaps I had been unfair. If anything, it came
off worse. There is the by-now standard trope of the anti-Semitic and
cowardly French, unwilling to fight and gratuitously anti-American.
There is the ludicrously contrived scenario that puts the SS back in the
heart of German military life, their first action being the breaking-up
of a crowd of protesters who (we learn later) are paid by aliens to sap
the German will to survive. There is the overnight transformation of
Germany into a high-tech military citadel, outlasting the France that,
unlike Germany, in the real world actually has a well-funded
battle-tested military not staffed by rejeuvenated nonagenarians. There
is the bigoted Israeli refugee who refuses to accept that the SS has a
right to redeem itself, and there is a revived Division Charlemagne
staffed by good French. By the time that I got where said Israeli
refugee pinned on his Judas Maccabaeus SS insignia, I gave up. _Watch on
the Rhine_ is a purely contrived scenario that no particular amount of
real-world sense, existing largely to show a "good" SS fighting
valiantly against the alien hordes in the name of Western civilization.
Why write a book like this? In the afterword, the authors mention that
the book began as a bet, which is unsurprising. Once you go deeper into
the afterword, you'll discover that this book does have deeper levels of
metaphor. The SS is a product of Western culture, they observe
uncontroversially enough. More, Ringo and Kratman argue, the
ruthlessness of the SS desperately need to be revived by the West in the
War against Terror. Softness and traitors within threaten the West;
sternness and internal purity will save it. John Keegan wrote
<http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2001-November/016543.html>
more concisely about this sort of thing, back in October 2001 for the
_Daily Telegraph_, though as a historian of the Second World War I think
he'd shy away from the SS as a role model. It's hardly as if its
atrocities are faked <http://www.heretical.com/walendy/fakes.html>, or
as if the SS wasn't intimately involved in the Holocaust
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel#Waffen-SS>, or as if even
the more conventional Waffen-SS units didn't commit crimes against
humanity <http://www.waffen-ss.no/warcrimes.htm>. after all.
In the end, _Watch on the Rhine_ is proof of the seductiveness of
Naziism, even sixty years after V-E day. Fascism in general has been
given a reputation for efficiency, since (as the theory goes) fascist
dictators were free to do whatever they wanted without having to bow to
their weak and divided subjects. This perception seems to be
particularly strong in regards to a Naziism that embraced a
post-Nietzchean will to power and claimed to lack of any moral or
physical restraints on the exercise of its force. This utter
ruthlessness has long been known as a selling point to gearheads and
sexual fetishists alike. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1975 essay
"Fascinating Fascism"<http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Sontag74a/>, "[n]ow
there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black,
the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is
honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death." The only problem
with this, in fact, is that the fascists were less efficient than the
corrupt democracies despite their claims, certainly in all the areas
that mattered. The SS weren't able to win the Second World War for
Germany, after all. Western liberalism might be an ideology of
decadents, but it consistently wins wars.
--
R.F. McDonald
r_f_mc...@yahoo.ca
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/
"What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
the same God?"
- Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<rfmcd...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Fascism in general has been
>given a reputation for efficiency, since (as the theory goes) fascist
>dictators were free to do whatever they wanted without having to bow to
>their weak and divided subjects.
...
> The only problem
>with this, in fact, is that the fascists were less efficient than the
>corrupt democracies despite their claims, certainly in all the areas
>that mattered.
My father was a tourist in Fascist Italy in 1939. He assured me that
the trains did not, in fact, run on time -- it was merely required
that the newspapers _report_ that the trains ran on time, when in fact
they typically ran an hour or so late.
I visited Italy in 2003. The trains really _did_ run on time.
--
Read the new Ethshar novel online! http://www.ethshar.com/thesprigganexperiment0.html
willre...@yahoo.com
Randy McDonald wrote:
<snipped it all>
We HAVE a thread on which this belongs (and I largely agree with it)
Why did you start a new thread?
I am asking this seriously and without (much) hostility as the starting
of what I think of as redundant threads seems to be a disease on
several newsgroups.
Will in New Haven
--
A man cannot have too many books, too many wines, or too much
ammunition.
-- Jeff Cooper
Chad Irby
Randy McDonald <rfmcd...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> I reread _Watch on the Rhine_ to see if, just perhaps, I had misread it
> the first two times, if perhaps I had been unfair.
<snip>
> There is the overnight transformation of Germany into a high-tech
> military citadel, outlasting the France that, unlike Germany, in the
> real world actually has a well-funded battle-tested military not
> staffed by rejeuvenated nonagenarians.
Just as a reminder: when did the whole French Army get all of that
battle testing, outside of some light peacekeeping duties and a couple
of thousand guys in Afghanistan? They're in the middle of a huge
revamping of their forces right now, and haven't had any real "testing"
of their new equipment or their force structure. The German Army has
had at least as much "testing" in recent years. The German and French
armies are about the same size in the real world, except the Germans
have better equipment and more armor.
You might also want to look that that budget, since a large part of it
is the funding of the Gendarmerie, which is really just a paramilitary
police force of 100,000 or so, and would be fairly useless in an actual
war. You also need to discount the French Navy and Air Force (and the
large amount they spend on their nuclear deterrent), since they'd be
fairly useless in the world of the Aldenata (note that aside from a
couple of battleships, the US Navy is seldom mentioned in any of the
stories, and the few times the USAF took the air they were slaughtered).
Meanwhile, in the book, the Germans were hit last, had more time to
prepare, have a larger land force to build on, and made some better
choices in strategy and equipment planning in the early part of the
story. They also had some really good terrain to help (since the
Posleen suck at river crossings), and a much, much stronger heavy
industry segment to build the equipment they needed for the war.
--
I don't have a lifestyle.
I have a lifeCSS.
Splicer
> My father was a tourist in Fascist Italy in 1939. He assured me that
> the trains did not, in fact, run on time -- it was merely required
> that the newspapers _report_ that the trains ran on time, when in fact
> they typically ran an hour or so late.
>
My answer to anyone who says that the "trains ran on time" is 'yes' - all
the trains that went to Treblinka ran on time.
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Wayne Throop
: More, Ringo and Kratman argue, the ruthlessness of the SS desperately
: need to be revived by the West in the War against Terror. Softness
: and traitors within threaten the West; sternness and internal purity
: will save it.
Pffft. Feh.
Superficially true. Fundamentally wrong-headed. IMO.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Nix
> My father was a tourist in Fascist Italy in 1939. He assured me that
> the trains did not, in fact, run on time -- it was merely required
> that the newspapers _report_ that the trains ran on time, when in fact
> they typically ran an hour or so late.
>
> I visited Italy in 2003. The trains really _did_ run on time.
If you run this the other way[1], the UK is therefore a fascist
dictatorship.
(Well, we *are* a one-party state: one party in power, one party which
everyone considers a joke with little chance of getting into power, and
the Liberal Democrats).
[1] which would be very fallasilly
--
`I work in computers so, of course, I'm an expert on everything.'
--- Simon Rumble